On this day in 1898, Norris Wright Cuney, politician, died in San Antonio. Born to a white planter father, Philip Minor Cuney, and a slave mother, Adeline Stuart, in 1846 near Hempstead, Texas, Cuney...(Read More)

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UPSON, CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS

UPSON, CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS (1829–1902). Christopher Columbus Upson, lawyer, legislator, and Confederate officer, was born near Syracuse, New York, on October 17, 1829. He attended schools in New York and Boston and Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts. He studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1851. In 1854 he was practicing law in Castroville, Texas, but in 1859 he moved to San Antonio. During the Civil War he served in the Confederate Army as a volunteer aide with the rank of colonel on the staff of William Henry Chase Whiting, acting as special treasury agent for the Confederate government. The Confederacy appointed him associate justice of Arizona in 1862. Upson was a presidential elector on the Democratic ticket in 1876. On the death of Gustav Schleicher he was elected to the Forty-sixth Congress and was reelected to the Forty-seventh, serving from 1879 to 1883. When he was not renominated in 1882, he resumed his law practice in San Antonio, where he died on February 8, 1902. He was buried in the Confederate Cemetery.